[GLLUG] Valve's Gabe Newell Talks Linux Steam Client, Source Engine

[Charles Ulrich]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Taylor Burke <taylor at zordio.com> wrote:
> I want to be excited about this. I really do. But the state of Linux video
> support is, well, abysmal. Xorg contains 40 years of code, and I really
> don't think anything short of a major rewrite is going to make it more
> effective.

Since Xorg forked from XFree86, it's been under constant development.
There was a time where you _had_ to edit the config file and customize
it to your specific hardware in order to run X at all. (Do you have
the modelines for your monitor written down somewhere? If not,
consider yourself lucky.) Now, everything is mostly automatic and you
don't have to touch Xorg.conf unless you have some unusual setup.

Except for video driver support, which the Xorg developers can't do
much about, what do you find lacking?

> Hardware acceleration barely works for "supported" distros out of
> the box, and there really aren't a whole lot of video cards that are
> supported at the level most games need to be.

It's a chicken and egg problem: the video card manufacturers won't
bother writing decent drivers for their hardware until a non-trivial
portion of their target market demands it. But gamers aren't going to
switch to Linux until there's better video support. Until then, the
open source drivers get written by geeks in their free time and most
chipsets end up getting workable support after they've been on the
market for awhile.

So for the most part, it's not all that bad for most of us with
middle-tier hardware. My biggest annoyance is that multiple monitor
support seems to have severely regressed in all of the major desktop
environments in the past couple years. (Even though X itself has no
problem with it.)

> Not to mention porting Steam
> to Linux would probably take quite a while, considering that last I read
> Gaben was in the stage of "wanting" to hire Linux developers.

The article that Don linked said that they have a team working on it
already and that some of the games already run...

Charles